Updates and Inspiration -- JRCLS Happenings Volume 13: Issue 8

Announcements

The Ethics and Public Policy Center is hosting the American Religious Freedom Program this Thursday, May 24, 2012 at the Georgetown Four Seasons Hotel in Washington D.C. (2800 Pennsylvania Ave NW). Registration and breakfast will begin at 8:00 a.m. followed by a day of sessions and speakers, including Hannah Smith, Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund; Elder L. Whitney Clayton, Presidency of the Seventy; the Honorable Michael Leavitt, former HHS Secretary and Governor of Utah; and many others. Visit www.religiousfreedom.org/conference2012for more information and to register.

Inspirational Thought

"[R]eligious freedom cannot be reduced to freedom of worship or even freedom of private conscience. Religious freedom means that religious groups as well as religious individuals have a right to exercise their influence in the public square, and that any attempt to reduce that fuller sense of religious freedom, which has been part of history in this country for more than two centuries, to a private reality of worship and individual conscience as long as you don't make anybody else unhappy, is not in our tradition. It was the tradition of the Soviet Union, where Lenin permitted freedom of worship (it was in the constitution of the Soviet Union) but not freedom of religion. ... This is not the American tradition, even though it is now argued by some Americans that it should be."

—Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., Archbishop of ChicagoCatholics and Latter-day Saints: Partners in the Defense of Religious Freedom, Address at Brigham Young University, February 23, 2010